[What's the lowest %condition you normally start a player in FM? 95%? 98%?]

5 minutes ago, 98765431 said:

Could you please also do the same for 'sharpness' to decode those mysterious description of trends like 'gaining sharpness' and 'losing sharpness' that are used to describe a static sharpness status? 

In all honesty, probably not. At least not anytime soon. These useless heart symbols bugged me enough to look into it further, but I'm not feeling anything like the same ire towards "sharpness".

What I've done is simple enough for anyone else to replicate if they have the time and inclination to do so though.

[What's the lowest %condition you normally start a player in FM? 95%? 98%?]

Great. But I would also say that I can tell between more than 4 levels of fitness.

[What's the lowest %condition you normally start a player in FM? 95%? 98%?]

8 minutes ago, DementedHammer said:

I for one would love this to be an option. 

I'm sure some would. I know there's a core of players who won't use any real life knowledge, who rely entirely on their scouts, who try to make things really difficult for themselves and that's great and I absolutely respect anyone who does that and you should play the game how it gives you the most enjoyment. I'm also fully in favour of options to suit as many people as possible and there's no reason why a skin couldn't be made which did some kind of conversion on the attributes so that it displayed them as 1-4 stars instead of 1-20 as a number.

I think it's fair to say though that most people want as much detail as possible.

[What's the lowest %condition you normally start a player in FM? 95%? 98%?]

Bad analogy, my car gauge tells me exactly how many miles I've got left in the tank. Almost all do these days.

Also, Messi dribbling might be 20 but is that discernible from a player with 19? Especially when propensity to dribble is further governed by flair and ability to do so moderated by technique, balance and agility.

So without looking Messi or some other player might well be Dribbling 20, Agility 20, Flair 20, Balance 20 but could you as a player or a manager really tell them apart from a player with one 19 somewhere in there?! Especially when this is all just opinion, there's no way to actually "measure" dribbling. Yet we've got all that to help us pick the best player, but when it comes to whether that player is fit to start a match, despite all the technology that top clubs have to accurately monitor fitness and condition, we get LIGHT GREEN HEART. 

[What's the lowest %condition you normally start a player in FM? 95%? 98%?]

I'm sure they'd love to know that a player is exactly 13 for crossing too, but they don't.

Make it the same each way and I'll have no cause for complaint. Give us a rating out of 4 for each attribute too, make it "more real":

Crossing * = Very bad

Crossing ** = Not great

Crossing *** = Good

Crossing **** = Excellent

Sounds more realistic when you think about it, so who's in for that, for all the attributes? No? Thought not.

[What's the lowest %condition you normally start a player in FM? 95%? 98%?]

14 minutes ago, craiigman said:

 

Which one is it?

I seem to be able to see them from the IGE.

If IGE means In Game Editor, then I don't have that at least not yet. Is it still an extra £5? 

Both quotes are true though, I thought what I wrote was pretty clear, apologies if not. From the vanilla game, you cannot see condition. Third party tools allow you to see it. No idea about the official editor.

[What's the lowest %condition you normally start a player in FM? 95%? 98%?]

Also, if there's seemingly virtually no difference between 85% fitness and 100% fitness then if I do say a whole season's matches of Team A on 100% vs Team B on 85%, then do the same in reverse, there should be no difference in league table.

I certainly have the time and maybe have the inclination to do just this, though it'd take a while as I have other stuff to be doing too, and from what I can tell from a quick Google there are real time editors available now? Does FMRTE allow you to see Condition, anyone know?

I could stop the game before a match, doesn't matter which one, and edit one team to be 100% Condition on all players and give them say 10 for each attribute, then make the other team 85% Condition and 10 for each attribute. Play that game 38 times, record the table. Then flip it around with Team A on 85% fitness and Team B on 100%. 

By replaying that one same game 38 times (for each setup!)  we're taking morale out of the equation and other variables which would change over the season because each match would have an identical starting point. I guess that would show definitively whether there's a problem here or not. If both tables come out roughly the same, all's well and I guess we can just adapt to the hearts. If not and there's a big difference ......

[What's the lowest %condition you normally start a player in FM? 95%? 98%?]

1 hour ago, JordanMillward_1 said:

They've said it's because people kept ignoring what they'd said about how different levels of fitness applied, and most people just didn't play people under 95% fitness, which doesn't happen IRL (at least in part because you don't know if someone is 90% fit or 95% fit IRL), and so to add the correct level of ambiguity that a real manager would be dealing with, they removed the percentages.

Well everything else is 1-20, or at least most things are. IRL, can you definitively say that a player is 13 for crossing rather than 12, or 14? No. But in the game you can. So we get 20 possible options for each of 36 attributes for a player, but only 4 options for Condition. It's quite laughable.

Dumb the whole lot down to 1-4 and then there's an argument for doing it for Condition too. Until then, IMO at least, there's not.

[What's the lowest %condition you normally start a player in FM? 95%? 98%?]

In game now, you can't. All you get is one of 4 different-coloured heart symbols which have barely any granularity at all. Before you used to get percentages for fitness and condition but they've been melded together now.

In a game which thrives on numbers and accuracy, it seems a remarkable dumbing-down of something which so many of us used to base a lot of our decision on. I've read on another forum(!) where I posted this that although nobody there thought it was a good idea either they'd heard the explanation (Maybe on here? I don't come here often these days) that giving a percentage was felt by SI to be too detailed or that there was allegedly barely any difference between the percentages anyway and that it was causing people to needlessly rotate squads.

To the first point, that 1-100 is too detailed, I'd say that given I can tell that my players' attributes from 1-20 in 36 different categories it's not too unrealistic compared to that. We're geeks, we thrive on numbers, many of which are already unrealistically presented but we love those numbers and need them. Dumb the whole game down to just marking all the attributes out of 4 as well and maybe the idea of doing it for condition/fitness will hold some water, but that'll never happen because we know the game in that state simply wouldn't sell. And whilst it might be a difficult argument to say that we can in real life, even with all the medical equipment available at top clubs, distinguish between a condition of 91% and a condition of 92%, we can certainly distinguish it into more categories than just red/amber/light green/dark green. That's stupidly oversimplified and not indicative of how the real world operates.

To the second point, that people were maybe over-relying on it and over-rotating their squad, I have 2 issues with this as an answer:

1) Sometimes I WANT to rotate my squad - Knowing someone is 92% fit gives me a reason to rest them, and sometimes I'm actively looking for reasons so that I can rotate things around a bit

2) Linked to the above, it's about maintaining your squad in peak fitness and this takes away my ability to do that, or at least stymies it greatly. If I'm starting first-team players on 85% on Saturday thinking they're top-notch when midweek we've got a big European match, I might knacker them for that without realising, meaning I've got to either put the basket cases on or play zombies.

What's people's thoughts knowing that the game is effectively forcing you to start players who are only at 85% condition? Is there a general acceptance that this is OK? Am I alone in my thoughts, or do you think it was better as it was before?

[What's the lowest %condition you normally start a player in FM? 95%? 98%?]

The pertinent data in raw form, for anyone interested....

First reading of the values, always absolutely spot-on in previous iterations so I trust it is still right:

Next a screenshot of my tactic screen sorted by "condition heart", I've scrolled to just show the bottom half as this is all that will fit on the screen and anyone above Giacomo Raspadori has a full green:

[What's the lowest %condition you normally start a player in FM? 95%? 98%?]

Doing a search, I've seen many people bemoan the new heart symbols as not giving the granularity we're used to in previous FMs so I thought I'd do some digging because (correct me if I'm wrong) I've not seen anyone attempt to put any actual numbers around it all.

Historically, I've always looked to rotate my squads to keep only players on 95%+ starting matches. Any lower than that, and on the bench they go. You'll all have your own number, maybe a little higher, maybe a little lower. But with the new heart symbols, anything over 85% is now a full green heart.

You see, it seems that you can still get access to the Condition and Fitness values from within the game. So I whacked everything into an excel table, as is my want, and cross-referenced it with the displayed hearts in the game. Initially I wondered if Condition played any part but I cannot see that it does, it seems linked directly to Fitness. I took one snapshot before and after my most recent match, so I had 2 data points per player. Obviously not everyone played so many players have the same value in both results, but I think I have enough to see what is what now:

Here the data is sorted by "Fit2", the post-match fitness value. As you can see, the cut-offs seem largely as follows in both data sets....

Full green heart - 100-85

Light green heart - 75-85

Orange heart - 65-75

Red heart - Under 65

My next task is to find out if the AI is happy to start players with a full green heart but high-80s for condition, or if it can somehow see what we can't and rotates them out basically giving it a massive advantage. I suspect this might be the case as a recent game prompted this very investigation - I noticed during a match that after just 20 minutes most of my players had fallen to "partial green" hearts while the CPU still had a team of full greens at half time. Either way though, that investigation is only going to show how rubbish these new hearts are, not whether they're rubbish or not. They're clearly utterly rubbish.

Also I do know you can hover your mouse over the hearts to get a little more info, but ain't nobody got time for that for every single player before every single match - I'd need to do an Excel sheet before every game. This is especially concerning as if that is data the CPU is using, it can do these kind of global comparisons in a micro second without breaking sweat, lending it a genuine and sizeable edge on the human player and, IMHO, rendering the game in its current state broken.

[Football Manager 2020 Pre-Release Beta *Official* Feedback Thread]

5 hours ago, karanhsingh said:

Actually in FM getting work permits post Brexit is FAR easier. It's more down to wages offered. 

Well that's only easier for if you're buying first team starters.

Buying hot prospects will be much harder, because they'll be coming in on low wages generally.